Animal Art Prints

Animal painting is the genre devoted to animals, alive or dead, wild or tame: hunting scenes and fighting beasts, portraits of horses, dogs and livestock, and studies of birds and wildlife. The English term animal painter is first recorded in the mid-18th century, used by the naturalist John Berkenhout, and in the 20th century it largely gave way to wildlife artist. The genre ranked low in the academic hierarchy, yet its best painters prospered, since kings and noblemen often valued their horses and hounds above loftier themes.

Animals are the oldest subject of painting, reaching back to the cave paintings of Lascaux, about 17,000 years old. Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor Young Hare (1502, Albertina, Vienna) set a standard of observation, with each hair of the fur drawn with the tip of the brush. Roelant Savery, court painter to Emperor Rudolf II, studied rare creatures from life, and his painting of a dodo (1626, Natural History Museum, London) records a bird that soon died out.

In 17th-century Antwerp Frans Snyders, a founder of Baroque animal painting, supplied the animals and food for Peter Paul Rubens’s compositions, while another specialist might add the landscape. In his own canvases, usually without people, many species crowd together, as dead game in kitchens and hunting trophies or alive in ferocious combat. Dutch specialists worked on a smaller scale: Paulus Potter gave a single farm animal portrait-like care in his life-size The Young Bull (1647, Mauritshuis, The Hague), and Melchior d’Hondecoeter filled parks and poultry yards with exotic birds. Carel Fabritius rarely painted animals, yet in 2014 the critic Jonathan Jones judged his small The Goldfinch (1654, Mauritshuis) the best portrait of an animal.

In 18th-century England specialists painted racehorses and prize livestock for their owners. George Stubbs spent about eighteen months dissecting horses for his engraved The Anatomy of the Horse (1766), and painted the rearing stallion Whistlejacket (about 1762, National Gallery, London) life-size against a bare ground. In France Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Alexandre-François Desportes painted the royal hounds and hunts, while lighter animal subjects became decorative capriccios set among garden statues.

By the mid-19th century a taste for animal subjects had spread through the middle classes. Edwin Landseer’s stag The Monarch of the Glen (1851, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) became an emblem of the Highlands. Rosa Bonheur, who held a police permit to wear trousers while sketching at horse markets, painted the surging Percherons of The Horse Fair (1852-1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). In 1831 Paris critics coined the word animalier for the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, and Alfred Munnings later carried the horse picture into the 20th century.

In a good animal painting, look for anatomy that holds true beneath the coat, for fur, feathers and hide each rendered differently by the brush, and for a living eye. Ask too whether the picture portrays one particular, often named animal, as racehorse portraits do, or a type.